This is funny and very self-aware of you, but you bring up a good point.
Would people feel worse/better/the same if the company said "you can take a day off today and we're going to give your day's salary to a bunch of minimum wage labor to perform charity work."
Or maybe give people the option to show up to the event or allow their salary that day to be use to pay a few people to show up in their place.
Sending people home defeats the purpose.
In which case the goal is to make people feel good about the company.
(https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kill_two_birds_with_one_stone)
I recommend two books:
1. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062339355/against-empathy/ Summary: people should be more compassionate, not more empathetic.
2. The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life http://elephantinthebrain.com/ Summary: 80% of what people do is signalling for others and themselves.
You were not wrong. It's just that these company exercises are all about social signalling. Instead of sitting in a circle and everyone telling everyone else about their values and empathy and personal development they did some task that achieved the same.
Minimum wage workers are extremely low quality. They have 0 skills and require education on everything. Sure Engineers need to learn too, but there's a gigantic difference.
Minimum wage workers are hard to find. Most people won't work for that little, so turnover is high.
Minimum wage workers don't care. They know they can find another job easily.
I was forced into paying 15$/hr for data collection as a result.
I'm not saying the method used was effective in that regard, but it's possible the aim went beyond what was immediately in front of you. Strongly bonded teams (whether built socially or through adversity) tend to be better teams.
I know HN probably skews towards an industrious/utilitarian/pragmatist point of view, but many of us probably work in teams where not everyone holds the same perspective. Understanding how those people work and are motivated is important.
Your example trends a little bit on the extreme end of the spectrum (I totally get your point, so), but the truth is that for a lot of people that is a truly good experience. IMHO companies are abusing this for cheap employee motivation and PR.
At that point, feelings play a pretty important role in getting you to stay.
When the pay is market then the feelings are important. When the pay higher then market, the feelings are not important. That's how finance keeps the talent. That's how Uber got away with what it got away with until it became clear that its employees were not going to become insta-rich after the IPO.
These examples are everywhere.
Would you still care about it if you were paid 3x or would you work for a couple of years and peace out?
Then if I could automate or outsource all my chores, I would only have free time to spend around the house while still doing my share!
Surely marital bliss and mutual appreciation would follow! :p
I'll be sure to farm out all my spousal duties if I have better things to do and I'll report back on how that went.
Honestly, I'm starting to think that very few married couples are really all that compatible in the first place, and that the institution isn't a very good deal for most people involved. Considering just how many marriages end in divorce, plus how many people simple stay single these days, it seems like marriage really isn't workable. It only worked in "the old days" because women were 2nd-class citizens who rarely could get good jobs, and social pressures just forced people to get married, and stay married, even if they were miserable together.
Careful that your spouse doesn't prefer the performance of those duties by the contractor to how you perform them.
However, in the particular case of moving, a friend might not want an untrusted stranger handling their belongings, so you would need their consent and they might not give it.
I can fully agree with that. I have only left one job to pursue "better" opportunities (a move abroad). I also regretted it later, as I left a great team. All the other exits were caused by me being tired of arrogant/ignorant managers.
Two out of three times it was about terrible working conditions and lack of a will to do anything to improve the situation.
- Simon Sinek, "The Infinite Game"
An excellent book that I'm recommending more and more.
Of course that doesn't do much good for the company's employees that don't wind up volunteering / doing the work, perhaps even increasing the separation the employees may feel toward the less-privileged. Service projects, mission trips, etc. can do a lot toward increasing humility, gratitude, and a spirit of giving in a more-privileged person. One could argue this is partly why companies want to do this sort of thing, so their employees grow (among other good / less-than-good reasons).
Perhaps a company could split the difference. Hire others to do the manual labor that day, but take half the company's team to the jobsite do the work with them. Then on another day you do the same with the other half. That way, all parties involved receive some benefit, and everybody is getting to meet a human being behind the statistics. Just a thought.
P.S. It's a certain level of irony when a party steps in to "help," when in reality they're taking away opportunity from parties more prepared for that sort of work, and are probably doing a worse job, aka building shoddily-constructed houses for the poor. This is especially a problem in developing countries, when an organization or church flies a bunch of inexperienced people into the country, brings in supplies, etc., and virtually takes over the available construction projects in an area because they're doing it for free. All of a sudden the local tradespeople have their businesses dry up, and they may not be able to recover -- and they're the ones that the area needs to continue the work afterwards! A far better method, in my opinion, is to get the locals involved and ask how you can help. Volunteerism is fantastic, but we should do it wisely. </soapbox>
I really wonder how much of it is this, and how much of it is virtue-signaling at the corporate level: "look at how great our company is! We have our employees spend work hours on charity work!"
While it wouldn't do much for "team building", it seems like society would be better off if these companies simply contributed to a fund to pay minimum-wage workers to do this charity work. This would get more charity work done, and also provide jobs for some underprivileged people.
As for your soapbox, I completely agree.
It used to be that religion provided these answers. Believe in God, have faith, go through these rituals, help the poor and you're a good person who has successfully discharged moral responsibility.
Religion has faded away, so we're left with "a good person helps the poor" which everyone agrees is a pretty moral thing to do. But the more indirect it gets the less moral value is assigned to it.
People assign moral value to hours of time invested because time is what we all have equally. Time is not money when it comes to judging character. It must be this way because otherwise it'd be that very high earning people help the poor to a vastly greater extent than the average person does, just by turning up to work every day and paying their taxes. If that automatically made them morally superior to everyone else, it'd create a lot of resentment. No matter how hard you worked you would never be as "good" as the rich guy who just turns up and does some lucky stock trading or whatever.
I think sometimes programmers don't feel this way to quite the same extent as other sorts of office workers because we sometimes get more meaning from our work than someone in e.g. sales. The Silicon Valley stereotype of "Join our startup because we're changing the world for good!" has a basis in real self-perceptions. If you believe you're making the world a better place by actually doing your work, of course doing extra charity stuff will seem silly and a poor allocation of time/money relative to other ways of achieving the same ends.
This would only make sense if paying taxes actually helped the poor. In America, it doesn't really follow. There's not much of a social safety net here. For proof, all you have to do is walk around various large cities' downtowns and see all the homeless people. There's thousands of them within a very short walking distance of the White House and Capitol buildings in DC.
Sure, America is very large. It may not be 'much' of a social safety net relative to other countries. But it's still the case that the rich subsidise the poor to a very large degree, in any western country.
There are some other components administered by the same agency, including TANF, SCHIP, and Medicare, so yes there is some safety net there, but relative to other western countries it's rather poor. If it weren't, we wouldn't have so many homeless people. America is NOT like western European nations.
In the end, all social security is a wealth transfer from rich to poor. Even rich employees become much (money) poorer when they retire. That's not a criticism, just an observation.
If it makes you feel any better, I found this line/story absolutely hilarious.
Not being able to read social queues, I once bought a girlfriend a massage at a place that was actually a brothel. My life is a trajecomedy.
One small company I worked for once did this, but with gathering apples that would otherwise have gone to waste ("gleaning") to give them to homeless shelters or something. Took up two or three hours, total, lots of driving (gas burnt), and so on. Fifteen or twenty people.
We wouldn't even have had to pay minimum wage workers to do what we did to substantially beat our productivity that day. Simply buying apples with ~3x the average worker's hourly wage times the number of workers we had there would have been embarrassingly more effective. I question the entire exercise and charity org behind it, actually. I suspect someone's making money off it one way or another, maybe just by building a "personal brand" as a corporate charity consultant or some such. The market's pretty efficient at getting cheap food to paying customers, and you probably can't beat the efficiency of simply buying food even at minimum wage rates, by manually harvesting from leftovers, however sad it may seem to let that food rot.
It's kinda a dumb idea, if your main goal is improving the world, to such a high degree that I think it'd set of alarm bells for even people who aren't into the effective-altruism thing.
[EDIT] back-of-envelope we could have bought 750-1000 pounds of apples without even getting some kind of bulk price. I think we "gleaned" like 200-300 pounds, tops, and it may have been less. It'd be much higher still if we figured it using company revenue for that span of 3 hours, rather than worker pay, and that's not factoring in all the costs of driving-people-to-the-orchard and all the driving-apples-all-over-the-place that the organization's volunteers did, nor their time. Overall I bet we weren't much more than 10% as effective as just buying apples.
But I suppose it might be for the volunteers to get back into the US than it might have been for a randomly selected group of construction workers. A back problem intervened, and the acquaintance didn't go.
Of course, it's not necessarily an effective use of time.
Self-reflection is often lacking in the profession. Many folks feel threatened by it. I used to be very emotionally invested in how unemotional and rational I was.
Now I accept that emotions are just part of the business of existing and thinking.